Benoit Dupin, the Vice President of Amazon A9?s Search Technology group, has left his position at the online retailer to join Apple, reports 9to5Mac. Dupin's profile recently was removed from Amazon's A9 website, and Dupin's LinkedIn profile now reflects his new position as Director at Apple.

At Amazon, Dupin worked in the A9 group, which powers product search and advertising throughout Amazon's international web stores. Dupin has experience working with search infrastructure, search experience and search relevance at Amazon. He also held positions at HP, Easyplanet and Canon Research France.

Dupin is joining Apple as a possible replacement for the exiting Cathy Edwards of Chomp, who joined Apple when the Cupertino company acquired the smartphone app search engine. Edwards served as the Director of Evaluation and Quality for Apple Maps, iTunes Store and App Store. Dupin will assume a similar role as Edwards, bringing his search expertise to those product areas within Apple.

Dupin's exact role at Apple in not known, but his search expertise could be utilized in Apple's Maps as well as its iTunes and App Store, all of which have been criticized for their undependable search results. The company regularly tweaks its search algorithm within its App Store, recently adding a new search suggestion feature for iOS owners. Apple also is rumored to be working on improving the Maps experience in iOS 8 with new transit Directions and improved points of interest data.

Apple things are generally crap at search the AppStore and Maps are useless unless you type exactly want you want most of the time - if Apple can perfect search it will help them in the long run - and maybe they won't have to relay on third parties like Bing for Siri.

I would say Finder is the best search Apple has done but even that is far from perfect.

I don't know who he is and don't want to know.... but wish anybody improves map search. Apple maps's search algorithm is horrible.

I wouldn't say horrible… within the last year, it's been fairly good and I've started seeing (in some cases) where I've looked things up on Google and it's been wrong, but Apple Maps has it right. I think they're improving very quickly and any experts they can add to the team will just make it better.

Apple's search can be pretty weak... I never noticed how good Amazon's is, which suggests it "just works!" You shouldn't have to notice. (I do wish Amazon's "revelance" ranking were less of a crazy mess.)

But even the low-hanging fruit of detecting/fixing common misspellings would boost Apple's store search results. I think they do a little of that, so they have the ability... why not do it nearly ALL the time?? Something's neglected.